And full speed ahead
Garrison Keillor thinks he can see the individual trees inside the forest, but all he is actually seeing the fecal matter stuck to his eyelashes.
Three-hundred thousand bikers spent Memorial Day weekend roaring around Washington in tribute to our war dead, and I stood on Constitution Avenue Sunday afternoon watching a river of them go by, waiting for a gap in the procession so I could cross over to the Mall and look at pictures. The street had been closed off for them and they motored on by, some flying the Stars and Stripes and the black MIA-POW flag, honking, revving their engines, an endless celebration of internal combustion.
A patriotic bike rally is sort of like a patriotic toilet-papering or patriotic graffiti; the patriotism somehow gets lost in the sheer irritation of the thing. Somehow a person associates Memorial Day with long moments of silence when you summon up mental images of men huddled together on LSTs and pilots revving up B-24s and infantrymen crouched behind piles of rubble steeling themselves for the next push.
You don’t quite see the connection between that and these fat men with ponytails on Harleys. After hearing a few thousand bikes go by, you think maybe we could airlift these gentlemen to Baghdad to show their support of the troops in a more tangible way. It took 20 minutes until a gap appeared and then a mob of us pedestrians flooded across the street and the parade of bikes had to stop for us, and on we went to show our patriotism by looking at exhibits at the Smithsonian or, in my case, hiking around the National Gallery, which, after you’ve watched a few thousand Harleys pass, seems like an outpost of civilization.
Yes, he is talking about the Rolling Thunder group. Yes, he is talking about them being “chickenhawksâ€, despite unmistakable fact that the majority of their membership are veterans. Methinks Keillor should have tried reading the back of their vests while waiting all that time to cross the street. Though I guess it must be difficult to read looking down your nose, as he is so fond of doing.
Yes, he is an ass. But you had probably already guessed that by now.
Found at Say Anything
You know, it’s not like the date and time of the Rolling Thunder activities was a state secret. If Mr. Keillor wanted to avoid the aggravation, he could have easily done so. Instead, he went out of his way to be offended.
Typical liberal asshat.
I hope someone as cultured as Mr. Kellor is at least consistant, and also berates people for marching in jazz funerals. How dare they play upbeat music and dance to remember the dead!
People decide to remember the dead differently. Some spent the day at cemetaries for the war dead placing flowers and/or flags. Others do the Rolling Thunder thing. While it may be insensitive to not remember the reason behind Memorial Day and instead just treat it as a day off work, I think it’s even worse to mock others forms of expression of rememberance on Memorial Day.
But Mr. Kellor is no stranger to mocking the beliefs and expressions of others. At some point a few years back he got fed up with public Christian sentiment, and declared that Christians should seceede from the United States because of the scripture saying that they should be in this world but not of it. On that day, Lake Wobegon ceased to be part of America for me and instead became part of the Blue State Archipeligo.
Maybe I should make Mr. Kellor’s jaw drop by telling him how I spent part of my Memorial Day; I played a bit of the Medal of Honor video games. Gasp in horror if you will, but the opening levels on two installments of the game send the player through the D-Day assault and the attack on Pearl Harbor. And playing those levels, immersing myself in the historical experience of those events makes me realize more of what those soldiers went through than just looking at black & white film. But that’s just my opinion.
I’ve quoted you and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2008/06/re-liberal-intellectual-snobbery.html